An interesting discussion but who mentioned consumers in the first place?

It's announcement filled with "will do" statements, and very few "are doing" and "have done" - which means I can read between the ilnes and assume that this is largely vaporware (as it were) so far. As to who will use the data, well almost certainly not the average consumer; they'll get bits and pieces fed to them by whoever can be bothered to mine the data for what they consider to be interesting statistics (undoubtedly the shocking ones not the mundane or predictable ones). That is, of course, whenever the "will do" list becomes a "did" list, at some point in the future.

As a side note, I don't particularly care whether the statistics are packaged by Narrative Solutions' Quill, or by a journalist or somebody else. Not all the data is necessarily of the type that might directly lend itself to statistical analysis anyway, so maybe there's a little more hope for the world than MedicalQuack suggests :)

I appreciate your points, and concede, I do not make my living writing software. So yes, there's a certain disconnect between the promises and the reality. I'd just say that for a long time, the reality has been the government refused to make its data available and it's a noteworthy to see leaders not only in the US, but in countries all over the world grasp why making it available is a good thing.

I see what you are saying, but look at the fraud in healthcare...as a comparison and it's always work to say a step ahead and it's not being done to well. I like technology and challenge those all the time who have never written software as you tend to have a "virtual" view instead of the real world and it takes time to find fraud for sure and nobody likes it, self included.

So what do we do, stop everything until we have our software and fraud all taken care of, of course not but do we want food grown...there's the real world if you will. Software is freaking hard to write and complex. My word of advice, is be careful with stats and analytics and look at the big picture here because it will never be perfect, so do we want less fraud or less food:)

I call this "The Grays" and it's happening everywhere and most recently at the Phoenix VA to where people died with executives chasing stats. Even the White House is just one big template as I have said for a few months and all models in the software world don't work in the real world. So again I have this talk with people all the time when assessing judgements. Doctors deal with the real world all the time and we have a name for that, patients.

So again I look at Monsanto for what they are a a whole with all their subsidiaries and what they do.

I'm not that smart but in developing software I very well know the illusions of a proof of concept at times as been there done that. You mgiht want to hash around what the virtual and real values are here if you want. The real world comes back to bite though all the time:)

MedicalQuack, I might offer another example then for consumers and farmers: Farmers pay a lot for premiums for crop insurance (its actually in the event of bad weather.) But as much as 20% of crop insurance pay out is for fraudulent claims. That's huge (compared to 1-2% for property insurance fraud). So if you could reduce the fraud, and reduce the premiums, that would help farmers, and consumers. Analyts looking at FSA and NASA open government data and satellite images can now detect fraudulent crop claims in the making. Don't know about you, but as a taxpayer, and a food buyer, I think that's a good thing.

I hear you as well and there is some value but again it's not for the consumer. You mention Monsanto and I look at what they do as a whole too and it's the small persona again too when you look at the link below with putting a 75 year old farmer out of business over violating IP property on "seeds"...oh there's so much subsidiary actions going on today too.

So on the other side of the coin you have information here being used partially by farmers on crops but and this is a big but the policing of coporate America to do it and after the story above, I Monsanto as a whole gave me a little different opinion.

Medical Quack, sorry for the data overload. And you're probably right, while consumers do benefit from weather, GPS and some medical data (ie i-Triage), this development probably isn't of much relevance to consumers, but it may to business folks and it does to our Government IT readers. To that point, I would ask: So was the sale of the Climate Corporation to Monsanto, for nearly $1 billion last year, which directly benefits from open government data policies like this, just another piece of meaningless news?

This is not a big deal for consumers, peiod. What's wrong with people in making this such a big deal in the news..is it "click bait"? Seriously though what does the consumer get out of this..absolutely nothing and when folks can get the data they can query with other data and sell it.

We are drowining in data news and frankly I'm tired of tweeters that act like magpies on twitter to think this is just earth crashing news and I suppose that's the subliminal condtioniong that has been going on.

Again why is this such big news? We had that with the CMS doctor data base and I was absolutely correct when I said it would be a media event a year before the data was release and that's what it was. Bots can be used to write media as well, like Narrative Science shown here.

Or you can get into LongTail and it can even do videos...so again I'm tired of data news..and journalists would like to write hard news but they are all starving for money and need click bait ad revenue.

All the data news makes for some of the most boring stuff out there and sure there's some real use for some of it but we're overloaded. I understand out CMO and CIO are working hard but darn put this in it's perspective and cut the garbage on this being such a huge asset for consumers when it's no. Frankly public companies that are cash rich should spend more money with onlines newspapers so wouldn't be stuck all of this as they would have money to operate and provide decent hard news.

It does how how selfish we are and stupid too if you will as these public cash rich companies just sit by and let the media die in esssence. Stock trading software looks for news and that's moves and trades stocks.

On its own, the US Government's action plans to advance Open Data don't look particularly agressive or forward thinking. Getting feedback from data users seems like a no brainer. But in the context of where governments, including the US Government has been - e.g. from a culture of need-to-know, to a need-to-share culture - on top of the mandate to make government data open and machine readable by default, these plans are necessary, albeit incremental, step in the right direction.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.